The great poets exert their ars combinatoria in a world
that will come after them.

The ars combinatoria has
an historical meaning; juxtaposed to Walter Benjamin, I had to look up the reference,
which presumably is Benjamin's One Way Street, specifically the section
entitled “Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment.” I made a web page out of the
German original and the published English translation:

For without exception
the great writers perform their combinations in a world that comes after
them, just as the Paris streets of Baudelaire’s poems, as well as Dostoevsky’s
characters, only existed after 1900.

The English translation
is fairly clear except for the key highlighted phrase, which is not only unclear,
but which suggests something different from “combine” in a passive sense, as in
“integrated into” or “combined with”. I do not know the intended meaning. It also
seems that ars combinatoria is not a concept to be found in the German
original—unfortunately, since it is so suggestive. But the possible Spanish mistranslation
gave me something to think about.

Learning
about Benjamin’s complex relationship to surrealism, and particularly, his critique
of surrealism, opened up a new angle of vision for me, with triangulations by
which to comparatively coordinate Benjamin, surrealism, Georg Lukács, and Jorge
Luis Borges, and, even if not implied in Benjamin's text, the ars combinatoria.

Borges & ars combinatoria

The first paragraph of Negroni
already lays down the question of the arbitrariness of taxonomic approaches to
reality, from the Encyclopédie to Borges, but also suggesting that no list
is entirely unmotivated:

. . . which (mock-)suggests
the arbitrariness of universal taxonomy that lies at the basis of the philosophical
languages of Wilkins' era, related to the ars combinatoria as expressed
by Leibniz in that era. For more on Leibniz (also a proponent of the philosophical
language project) and the history of the ars combinatoria, and on philosophical
languages see:

The two major historical
incarnations of the ars combinatoria are represented by the medieval theologian
Ramón Llull, who thought his ars magna could logically prove the tenets
of the Catholic faith, and Leibniz, a pioneer of symbolic logic, who, while also
engaged in theological proofs, was more broadly interested in metaphysical, scientific,
logical, and mathematical concerns. Naturally, schemata such as those of Wilkins
could be criticized on every level, from the taxonomic approach to the natural
universe (and in relation to the limited scientific knowledge of the time) to
the dimensions of moral, psychological, cultural, and social concepts, and of
course, theological matters. But the cultural universe in toto is of such
a peculiarly complexly textured nature, how could one render that in terms of
such taxonomies, when even those areas in which conceptual or logical clarity
is posited the project proved to be unworkable? And what creativity or novelty
could ultimately be generated by universalizing the ars combinatoria as
the master approach to analyzing the world, especially in consideration of the
full cultural universe we inhabit?

This brings us to even more revealing
work of Borges, which draws us into the cultural universe. See my analysis of
Borges’ brilliant fiction of Pierre Menard:

Here
we find literary examples which fictionally portray the creative sterility of
a sensibility which is merely mechanically combinatorial. Borges is brilliant
in his fictional illustrations. I also raise the question in my essay on Menard
of the relation of Borges to surrealism, with its obsession—harking back to Lautréamont—with
startling juxtapositions. See also the reference to René Magritte, who sought
out deeper resonances in his juxtapositions.

As we return to Benjamin,
we can pose the question, exploiting the perspectives cited, including that of
Borges: what insight can we gain into the historicity of such combinations and
juxtapositions of objects in the cultural universe, and what anticipations of
the future?

Borges himself, in his dreamlike ironic literary-philosophical
relationship to reality, could never approach the concerns of historical materialism
that would touch Benjamin. Borges imaginatively lived in a permanent philosophical
inversion of reality. I attempt to analyze his approach in my essay:

Now
with this behind us, we can return to Benjamin's relation to surrealism.

Benjamin’s
critique of surrealism

Cohen's book summarizes this in an inspiring way.
Of interest is Benjamin's goal of attaining insight into the historical and social
meaning of objects, of reconstructing their unarticulated stories, of building
upon them conceptually. While the initiators of historical materialism might not
have had someone like Benjamin in mind, he seeks in some fashion to contribute
to the history of the artifacts of human civilization in this spirit. Surrealism,
however, in its absolutization of the unconscious, of automatism, of startling
juxtapositions, of obsessive foregrounding of collections of objects, freezes
the phenomena it gathers in a state of immediacy, in which no historical or conceptual
depth can be fathomed.

Benjamin was obsessed with collections and thus with
the possible ways of grouping objects and teasing out their historical meaning
and covert relationships. But one sees here how a merely combinatorial approach
without some deeper approach informing the appropriation of the collocation of
objects could in itself not generate novelty or creative insight in the realm
of culture and society. Borges intimates the same without having any social or
historical analysis to offer, mired in a perpetual state of idealistic metaphysical
anxiety. We see in Benjamin a peculiar ars combinatoria on a level beyond
what had been previously conceived.

The
great poets exert their ars combinatoria in a world that
will come after them.

“Manorially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment”
purports to relate the overplushed interiors of 19th century bourgeois homes to
the menace threatening from without, as perceptible in Poe as the inventor of
the detective story. Benjamin suggests that Dostoevsky and Baudelaire already
discerned the contours of a world that would succeed them. I do not understand
Benjamin's meaning nor do I have the background sufficient to evaluate his assertions,
but their very positing adds to the imaginative repertoire in which we could include
the ars combinatoria, Alfred Jarry’s ’Pataphysics, surrealism, and Borges,
and climb to a vantage point superior to them all.

Benjamin and Lukács

Lukács'
well-known opposition to literary modernism is associated with the notion that
the avant-garde reproduces the fragmentation and mystification of decaying bourgeois
society and cannot reproduce an intelligible picture of the social totality in
the way that the best of bourgeois European literature did. Lukács was a product
of an earlier time and was imprisoned (metaphorically speaking and more) his entire
life in Eastern Europe. His social landscape was far too limited to expand his
perspective, which excludes both the necessarily fragmented gropings into the
future and the bulk of imaginative literature. Suppose that the totality can now
only be approached not through the medium of art but only by way of the retrospective
analysis of art. We have a whole 20th century to analyze now, even as we in our
current daily situation decline into ever more absurd fragmentation and decadence.
Actually, the valid aspect of Lukács' criticism applies now more than it did when
he was writing, for both our realism and our fantasy (which have collapsed into
one another) saturates us with the phenomenal dimension of our experience while
hiding its essence more subtly than ever. The coherence behind apparent incoherence
(and vice versa) can be brought out by the sophisticated tools of analysis now
at our disposal, but one would be hard put to do justice to it via realistic literature,
as vitally important as that would continue to be. (actually, the best of science
fiction, the work of Samuel R. Delany, for example, might do a better job, or
did, since we are now living a debased form of science fiction, and imagination
of anything beyond our current state has dried up.)

Benjamin was a navigator
among the fragments, and sought to add to them the dimension that Lukács postulated
for art. I am not in a position to judge his achievement, but Benjamin's juxtaposition
to surrealism is at least instructive of the extent of what has to be synthesized.
The 1920s were pivotal in the ongoing cultural revolutions of the 20th century.
Intellectually, we have to live retrospectively, even as we drown in the immediacy
of social decay, summing up everything we have learned from human history as we
tread water before succumbing to exhaustion or summoning a new surge of strength.
Hopefully, our capacity for pattern recognition will prove to be neither mechanical
nor arbitrary.